Book-Tube-A-Thon Days 4 & 5 Update!

Days 4 & 5 were all over the place for me reading-wise.

Although, I am of two minds about having finished the audio of my beloved

RIVERKEEP.

The Danék is a wild,
treacherous river, and the Fobisher family has tended it for
generations—clearing it of ice and weed, making sure boats can get
through, and fishing corpses from its bleak depths. Wulliam’s father,
the current Riverkeep, is proud of this work. Wull dreads it. And in one
week, when he comes of age, he will have to take over. Then the
unthinkable happens. While recovering a drowned man, Wull’s father is
pulled under—and when he emerges, he is no longer himself. A dark spirit
possesses him, devouring him from the inside. In an instant, Wull is
Riverkeep. And he must care for his father, too. When he hears that a
cure for his father lurks in the belly of a great sea-dwelling beast
known as the mormorach, he embarks on an epic journey down the river
that his family has so long protected—but never explored. Along the way,
he faces death in any number of ways, meets people and creatures
touched by magic and madness and alchemy, and finds courage he never
knew he possessed.

“Are you happy with your
life?” Those are the last words Jason Dessen hears before the masked
abductor knocks him unconscious. Before he awakens to find himself
strapped to a gurney, surrounded by strangers in hazmat suits. Before a
man Jason’s never met smiles down at him and says, “Welcome back, my
friend.”

In this world he’s woken up to, Jason’s life is not the
one he knows. His wife is not his wife. His son was never born. And
Jason is not an ordinary college physics professor but a celebrated
genius who has achieved something remarkable--something impossible.

Is
it this world or the other that’s the dream? And even if the home he
remembers is real, how can Jason possibly make it back to the family he
loves? The answers lie in a journey more wondrous and horrifying than
anything he could’ve imagined—one that will force him to confront the
darkest parts of himself even as he battles a terrifying, seemingly
unbeatable foe.

Sussex, England. A
middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral.
Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at
the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most
remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He
hasn't thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a
pond that she'd claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old
farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past
too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone,
let alone a small boy.

Forty years earlier, a man committed
suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse
on a firework, his death lit a touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable
ways. The darkness was unleashed, something scary and thoroughly
incomprehensible to a little boy. And Lettie—magical, comforting, wise
beyond her years—promised to protect him, no matter what.

A groundbreaking work from a master, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
is told with a rare understanding of all that makes us human, and shows
the power of stories to reveal and shelter us from the darkness inside
and out. It is a stirring, terrifying, and elegiac fable as delicate as a
butterfly's wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark.